Recently, a bunch of unknown and similar apps surged to the top of the App Store at the same time numerous users reported that they had received charges for apps they never bought. 41 of the top book applications were roughly coded and in Vietnamese, suggesting the work of hackers and impeding the sales of legitimate apps.
“I had hoped things would get back to normal thinking that, eventually, these weird apps would just go out of fashion,” said Romanian developer Alexandru Brie. “There was a drop in sales, not only for me but for all the developers whose apps had been shifted by the 41 apps in question.”
“It looks like the Books category has been hijacked by an app publisher named mycompany/Thuat Nguyen,” said QuickReader developer Patrick Thomson. “His apps now occupy 40 of the top 50 ranks in the Books category on the app store. These are apps that typically wouldn’t rank in the Books category and most of them don’t have any ratings or reviews.”
It is believed that this issue has been going on for at least a couple of weeks. The few comments the apps have come from users who say their accounts have been hacked.
“It would appear that this publisher is hacking accounts and buying his own apps in order to drive up his rankings in the Books category,” Thomson wrote. “This is having a negative impact on our apps, which are being pushed down in the rankings and losing visibility, plus it makes for a bad user experience.”
Most of the applications had been removed when it became plainly obvious there was a problem. However, a couple of suspicious applications in the top 200 remained. “I noticed these ones haven’t been removed as of yet,” Brie said. “Perhaps Apple is investigating them in more detail, as they are not as obvious as the first ones.”
Source: PC World
